Ohh! Ohh! I want to play too.
Do you have a specific one in mind? Maybe…
Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West
I mean, it is A history book…
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What’s fascinating to me is if you go to Israel and stand in the old city of Jerusalem, you see Arabs, Palestinians, Jews and Christians living together in relative peace and balance. Yes there are tensions, mostly surrounding the Temple Mount and Al-Aqsa Mosque since both sides desperately want the same piece of real estate as their own. But for the most part, the various groups have learned to live beside each other and share the 3 square kilometer Old City.
It’s the zealots on both sides which have become unretractable and not willing to give an inch to the other side. The current Knesset majority is comprised of mostly ultra-Orthodox hard liners who are completely unwilling to compromise with the Palestinians and continually violate existing agreements with ongoing settlement activity in the West Bank. The stupid wall has not helped matters either and moving the embassy only succeeded in fanning the flames even higher.
It’s become the Hatfields and McCoys over there with so many long term grievances and retaliations nobody can remember who started it. For someone like Jared to step in and think he’s going to magically settle the conflict is the epitome of hubris.
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Remember back when people used to point to Hamas’s charter? Anyone who knew anything knew the charter was more rhetoric than policy, but people would harp on it endlessly. Hamas finally changed its charter and the response was basically, “Meh, whatever. It’s just rhetoric.”
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Yes, that’s The Narrative –
Hamas = Evil
Hamas = Palestinians
Therefore: Palestinians = Evil
And furthermore: So what if so many Palestinians are living in an open air prison and get killed in conflicts with Israel at a rate of 1000 to 1 and get their homes stolen and replaced by Jewish-only settlements? They deserve it, because they are Hamasbecausetheyareeviletcetc
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Yep. Pretty much the case… not that Hamas isn’t a big part of the problem, but they most certainly changed their charter and it had no measurable impact on how people viewed them. They also get blamed for pretty much any acts of violence, even if it’s one of the competing groups that have popped up over the more recent years.
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Dude, do you even know why the British Mandate existed? LOL *Urge to spam Paradox Games memes rising*
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I completely support that.
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Yes, I read Villehardouin’s narrative a while back. the whole Crusade reminded me of a GM having a whole campaign mapped out and the players going off the rails.
(I think it was a Penguin book with Joinville’s 7th Crusade description. that was a debacle…)
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Israel partially responsible for Hamas, when the Israeli government was trying to destabilize the PLO? Kind of like the US is partially responsible for Bin Laden and Al Qaeda because the CIA was arming and training them to act as militants and resist the Soviets during the period of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan?
Also, it might be interesting to compare the Likud charter and “from the river to the sea”, against the Hamas charter, since so much is said about the latter and so little about the former.
Extremists on both sides, with US and European colonialists and religious zealots, extremists, and nationalists as big a part of the reason for this conflict persisting for decades as are the current residents of the region.
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Apply to every social ill in the world today and yesterday.
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Yes, I believe that to be the case… I want to say that the CIA might have been partial in on that as well?
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I’ve always said, لا فتح و لا حماس
“Not Fatah or Hamas.” Palestinians have always deserved better, though the diaspora doesn’t get a vote. But, the rationale for refusing to engage with Hamas in a political process has always been predicated on this idea of their charter being non-negotiable and the idiotic “give a mouse a cookie” parable applied very one-sidedly to violence.
Hamas may not be ideal, but it’s not like making any progress with them would have been completely impossible. It might not even be now, though I don’t hold my breath.
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I agree. The refusal to work with them at all has only led to the brink of disaster. But it’s often been intentional. The fact that once they changed their charter, that people STILL refused to deal with them, despite having won an election speaks volumes.
Indeed. So do Israelis and pretty much all the other citizens of the Mid East, etc. The west has often acted as an obstacle to peace, too. There are so many bad actors with bad intentions that it makes untangling the problems that much more difficult. Everyone is to blame, but then no one is to blame. And whenever we do get some movement, someone gets shot for doing so (Sadat and Rabin).
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I blame Stalin:
The interwar mandate system is just as responsible, if not more so, than what Stalin was doing here (and it doubt he was the only one shipping in arms to the conflict). Moreover, the “who is more guilty” mode of thinking about the cold war isn’t very helpful in analyzing what was actually happening nor does it acknowledge the agency of people in the middle east in the equation, as they often played both sides off each other for their own benefit.
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You are SO right!
I love this line (married to a 100% dutch girl btw)
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It never ceases to amaze me how some political actors will claim neutrality and claim to be a fair, unbiased go-betweens in disputes between other parties, all the while politically, financially, and even militarily supporting only one side.
The US has constantly appointed biased ambassadors, “diplomats”, “negotiators”, etc., to allegedly work to resolve the Israel/Palestine conflict (have they ever appointed an Arab?), all the while providing billions of dollars of military support for Israel to maintain its belligerent military occupation of the Palestinians and its siege on 2 million Palestinians in Gaza. And the “negotiators” are routinely Zionists (whether Jews or Evangelical Christian Zionists), so their minds are already made up.
It’s as bad as Fox News “Fair and Balanced”… The hypocrisy of appointing settlers and Zionists as supposed “impartial” negotiators… all while they are violating international law in transferring or assisting the transfer of Israeli colonists to Palestinian territory…
Damn. Damn Kushner, Greenblatt, all of them.
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That is the largest badminton birdie I have ever seen.
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